Tap to dive into images with interactive captions, rotate 3D objects, swipe through image galleries, watch videos in full screen, and more

Use a finger as a highlighter when swiping over text in a textboot

Take advantage of Study Cards to help you memorize important highlights, notes, and glossary terms

Tap glossary terms to see definitions of key topics and concepts without leaving the pageThe iBookstore offers textbooks on Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, Geometry, and Physics from McGraw-Hill and Pearson.

These textbooks are currently available to customers in the United States. Textbooks from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are coming soon.

Comments:

Don’t get too excited about all the Apple iBooks self publishing news. As soon as you publish you create and publish your book through Apple’s “iBooks Author” you give up your rights to publish that book through any of the wide variety of popular eBook publishers. I don’t work for this company but my personal suggestion would be to use Smashwords.com. If anyone has tried going through the process of getting an ebook published and up for sale on more then one site then you know that each site has a different system and different requirements that make the entire process long and frustrating for each of them. Smashwords.com helps you easily get your ebook properly formatted and submitted to a ton of the major ebook retailers including: Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBook Store to name a few. They also sell your ebooks on their own online store and make your ebook available for sale in just about every format that exists and to top it off they do all of that for free!

A little alarmist here. You don’t give up your rights to your IP by using iBooks Author. The restriction ( yes, a fairly show stopping one for a lot of us, Apple fans or not) is that if you use iBook Author to create a book TO SELL, Apple requires that it be sold only thru the iBookstore. If you’re giving it away? They don’t care what you do with it. And you can use some other tool to create ePub or mobi files to sell the same material elsewhere.

Of course, since you can’t use iBook Author generated ebooks with any platform other than iBooks… Due to some proprietary features… Why would anyone creating an ebook for a non Apple platform want to use it anyway?

Ignoring, of course, that this means you can’t use this tool for creating paid books for side loading ebooks.

I expect them ( Apple ) to back off on this onerous idea if there’s enough uproar, like they did to some of the more obnoxious App store rules.

The ease-of-use of the iPad gives it a head-start in schools – they’re better than Android for now, and certainly better than desktops or laptops. But everything will eventually catch-up. Getting great content delivered to students on a great device like the iPad is going to be fantastic.

This is one more step towards looking at this from a problem of technology ubiquity rather than one of scarcity.

As for me I think that:
1. Every student should have an iPad which will be cheaper than buying 1 or 2 years worth of old expensive dead-tree textbooks.
2. Everyone will prefer an interactive textbook that includes animated charts,video clips, audio commentary over the static dead tree pages.
3. New textbooks are so much cheaper at $15 that they are cheaper than second-hand anyway.
4. The iPad is engaging and captivating drawing learners in when used properly.